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Torrid book, blander film?

ROME — When it hit Italian screens late last year, "Melissa P.," a major motion picture, caused as much of an uproar as the novel upon which it was based: "One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed," the allegedly autobiographical account of a promiscuous Sicilian teenager that became an international best seller.

Though there's hardly any nudity and the boy(s)-meet-girl plot oozes movie-of-the-week morality, to read the reviews and front-page editorials you'd think Italian teenagers had been lining up to watch an underage version of "Deep Throat."

The "Lolita of the new millennium," as Melissa was described in the Milan daily Corriere della Sera ("less brazen, more trash") was publicly reviled as a negative role model for today's teens. Last week, the psychologist and Corriere columnist Francesco Alberoni cited the "triumphant success" of the book and the film to explain how contemporary sex education promoted sex "without emotions and without love."

Film critics booed, and conservative lawmakers howled when the film's producer, the actress Francesca Neri, got airtime to plug the film during a Sunday talk show popular with families.

Then the original Melissa P., the author Melissa Panarello, dismissed the film as being superficial and clichéd. "It's opinionated and full of prejudices that inevitably deteriorate into dime store psychology," she wrote in a letter published by Italian news agencies.

Devotees of the novel - which recently sparked new polemics after the National Central Library in Florence nominated it to the 2006 long list of a prestigious international Irish literary prize - rushed to Panarello's defense. Her blog (www.melissap.org) was inundated with messages disdainfully rejecting any remote parentage between the best seller and the movie version. "Why don't you sue them," asks Marzia, one blogger who harped on various inconsistencies ("In the book you do the whipping," she writes. "I remember you wore high heels. Awesome.")

Despite the bad press, or perhaps because of it, "Melissa P." beat out "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" when it opened in November, and it's become one of the five top-grossing Italian films of last year, with more than E6 million (about $7.4 million) in ticket sales.

Co-financed by Sony International, the movie will be released in Spain next month, capitalizing on the nationality of the lead actress María Valverde, and there are plans to distribute the film in other European countries as well as the United States, a representative of Sony International said, though release dates have not been set.

The director, Luca Guadagnino, believes that the film struck a chord with young Italians because his rewrite of Panarello's novel skirted the sexual to isolate more universal issues. The book, he said, had done little more than stimulate the reader's morbid curiosity "to know how far she'd go with her body count."

The movie, on the other hand, wanted to "focus on themes dear to me: becoming and adolescence, the powerful possibilities of coming of age," he said during an interview in a chichi Rome café. There was no reason, he felt, to write a script that would verge on the soft porn, let alone hard. "There's already so much of that in cinema today." In the end, the ratings board banned the movie to children under 14.

Besides, Guadagnino's first film in 1996, the short "Qui," was a graphic depiction of the intimate act that made Monica Lewinsky a household name.

"So for me, I'd already done my research on how to use sex and the body," he said. Four films later "I wanted to explore the world through the eye of an adolescent more than see sex on screen."

Still, the suggestion of sex on screen was used to fuel the polemics, which were unusually passionate and resounding, with echoes reverberating equally loud on the pages of communist and conservative newspapers.

But in a country where scantily clad teenagers dancing suggestively are a constant on television variety and game shows, the outcry was pegged by some as hypocritical.

"In the end, the taboo of the film is that Italian girls do things that parents don't want to think about," explained the television critic Gianluca Nicoletti. "They don't want to admit to themselves that their children are doing more than staring deeply into each other's eyes."

And like it or not, Nicoletti believes, Italian teens are precociously sexual, their emancipation facilitated by their skillful exploitation of new fads like text-messaging (which the critic described as a "national sport"), where the two correspondents can "achieve a level of intimacy much sooner than the courting rituals of the past," he said.

To condemn the film without recognizing what goes on in Italian society speaks of "devastating hypocrisy," Nicoletti said during a phone interview.

Guadagnino has taken the polemics in stride. "The response is in the box office," he said. "This is a pop movie for kids, not a boring movie about kids made for a judgmental audience. It has no pretenses to the art house circuit."

"I was willing to embrace pop boldly, bravely and with no sense of inferiority," he said. "It's not a novel; it's not a speech. This is a movie, and it's compelling and entertaining."